I have been working on building one of my routes in recent weeks. Today after making a small change to the trackwork I saved the game but it crashed during the save! I tried to reload the route but it crashed on loading. On the third attempt to go back into the editor on the route it did load but there was no track at all on the entire route. I did a bit of investigation and the tracks.bin file is showing as 0kb. It won't open with RW tools, but opens an empty page in Notepad++. It looks like the track I have been working on recently still exists in the track tiles folder though. My last backup of the route was from 3 days ago. I took the tracks bin file from there and replaced the corrupted one with it. The route now loads with gaps where any recent work was. If there is any way anyone knows of to recover or rebuild the file any help would be appreciated. I guess though I'm going to have to remove the track tiles I have been working on to match the tracks.bin from my backup from 3 days ago and just redo that trackwork. I should probably make backups daily especially if I've been doing so much in that day. At least I know what I'll be doing this weekend. Wish me luck.
AFAIK there is no way to recover a corrupted tracks.bin, the only protection is to make backups regularly (I know, hindsight right?). However I'm always happy to be proven wrong and I suspect you might get a more technically minded and experienced response over on the UKTS forums, worth a try at least.
Yeah I'm pretty sure there's no way to get any of that back, which is why saves of big routes (especially when doing trackwork) can prove to be tedious work. Best bet is backup as often as you can, preferably after any big changes, even if it means backing up twice in a day. For track laying. I do it any time I reach a landmark, like another station or junction.
Use any backup every single day while building your route. I spent 7 years on a router and successfully restored the track bin over a dozen times in the course on construction. Monthly I would do test restores to make sure it worked. When you put 1000s of hours into a route leave nothing to chance. Windows still has the native backup Windows embedded in windows10. Search "backup". And get an external drive of 1TB to back the entire system up.
